Cyrano de Bergerac

The American inability to honestly see and discuss power pisses me off.

Cyrano de Bergerac has two chief propulsive factors: the love triangle and great soul/fair face dichotomy; and Cyrano's struggle against the powerful. They're equally important. The loathesome Steve Martin/Daryl Hannah vehicle "Roxanne" strips out the second completely - which aesthetically reminds me of the first French edition of Anna Karenina which omitted huge sections of the Kitty/Levin story; and morally of a certain British productions of (1) Pride and Prejudice, wherein Lady Catherine really intended to push Darcy and Elizabeth together and (2) of Prince and the Pauper, which reduced Twain's commners into buffoons. Yes, those well-meaning aristocrats and their understandable allergy to the lower orders. So Americans get Cyrano as a problem for the plastic surgeons apparently - or, at most, NOT for the plastic surgeons.

That's not a blindspot for French writers. That's not how Stendhal or Balzac or Hugo worked. My favorite example is Beaumarchais - we think of the Barber of Seville if, at all, in the operatic versions . That stuff was revolutionary at the time - Figaro's class and station was the point of his victory.

It's interesting that even if the relatively faithful (but in verse!) and superbly acted version I just saw missed a couple of power points. Although it didn't completely screw with the play by conflating Ragueneau and Le Bret, as another version I saw did, there were two small changes I noted: one, it did combine Le Bret and Captain Carbon, making Cyrano's military superior also his best friend (tin ear the the power matter); and it deleted the introduction to Christian of the Cadets, with the ironic exchange. "You are all barons!" "All!" Americans don't think that was important - it was. (Unlike this versiions combination of Ragueneau and Ligniere, the only problem of which is that R. was supposed to be a rotten poet, and Ligniere presumably gifted enough to provoke attempted murder, and it is good to make that distinction rather than Cyrano rather bizarrely assuring R. that he really IS a poet. Shades of the self-esteem world!)

One of the most interesting aspects of this is that Cyrano's interesting relationship with Roxanne is completely irrelevant to the attack that causes his death - this is the denouement of his constant struggle with the Powers-That-Be., although his determination to make it to Roxanne despite the attack was the immediate cause. Anyway - two equal themes.

Other notes: dumbing down the play (making the wit/psychological points more obvious) wasn't so bad, except for the execrable (and even symbolically incomplete) rendition of the final line; "My panache!" My panache?????

I made it to the fifth act before tearing up. One of our party who will remain nameless (but to whose jeans a reference was made previously in this journal) made it only as far as "The feast of Lazarus..." in the Third. Callous me.